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In response to the National Leadership Education Agenda, this application brief furthers priority one, addressing the teaching, learning, and curriculum development of leadership education. The ability of students to demonstrate leadership outcome mastery in areas of communication, self-awareness, interpersonal interactions, and civic responsibility (Seemiller, 2014), is valued across disciplines. Socratic Circles provide a structured discussion learning strategy based on Socratic pedagogy (Copeland, 2005), beneficial to the practice of leadership outcomes. Discussed are descriptions of implementation methods; outcomes related to Seemiller’s (2014) Student Leadership Competencies; and practitioner reflections of the use of Socratic Circles in college level leadership courses.

This study compared characterizations of successful leaders held by students enrolled in a college level leadership education program to those of students who did not participate in the program. Participants consisted of students from the following groups: graduating seniors who completed the leadership program, students enrolled in the first course of the program, and students who never enrolled in leadership courses. Each participant rated a “successful leader” on descriptors from Duehr & Bono’s (2006) Revised Descriptive Index. Scoring of these descriptors resulted in five leadership dimensions: agentic, communal, task-oriented, relationship-oriented, and transformational. Analyses compared these dimension ratings across the three groups of participants. Results revealed that non-leadership students ascribed significantly higher levels of agentic and task-oriented characteristics to successful leaders than both beginning and graduating leadership students. Non-leadership students also ascribed significantly lower levels of communal characteristics to successful leaders than graduating leadership students. Results showed no significant differences between the three groups of students in relationship-oriented or transformational characteristics ascribed to successful leaders. These finding have implications for leadership education.

Blogging can be an effective way for students to increase their engagement with course content. Using their daily lives as a leadership laboratory enables students to observe leadership theories in familiar contexts. This application brief discusses a semester-long assignment where students were asked to reflect on, synthesize, and apply course material through a personal blog. This assignment has been used in an online undergraduate survey of leadership theory course for non-leadership majors. Students reported that maintaining a personal blog helped them improve their critical thinking skills, recognize and document the practicality of the course material, and remain accountable and learning throughout the entire semester. Two recommendations are presented for instructors considering a reflective blog assignment: avoid being too prescriptive in the questions asked and refrain from requiring students to comment on each other’s work.

Principles of Peer Leadership is an undergraduate course developed through the collaboration of leadership educators with colleagues from residence life and fraternity/sorority life to provide instruction to undergraduate students serving in peer leadership positions across campus. The course comprises online and recitation components to connect leadership concepts to the students’ peer leadership practice. This application brief is intended to a) provide an overview of the course along with relevant scholarship used in its design, b) detail the course format and its various components for developing leadership skills, and c) offer educator reflections about how the course has worked well, and areas for improvement. Among the recommendations for future practice is a clear message of collaboration with university stakeholders and continuous assessment.

Over the past decade, a growing number of institutions of higher education have added leadership studies as a formal academic program of study. In many instances, however, students have not been included as partners or stakeholders in the design and delivery of leadership education, and student motivation and retention have subsequently suffered (O’Donovan, Rust, & Price, 2016). This application brief describes a new program, Student Assessment Fellows, which aimed to address these concerns by involving a small group of students in several capacities during the reshaping of a university’s leadership program. Through this program, students learned basic tenets of leadership pedagogy and educational program assessment and used both skill sets to author a proposal to restructure the existing academic program. This article reviews the development and design of the program, recommendations from the first cohort, and recommendations for other colleges and universities looking to increase student involvement in educational assessment processes.

Leadership educators teach Transformational Leadership Theory in their classrooms, but could transformational theory be used as a pedagogical model to deepen students’ understanding of leadership? This article presents Erin Gruwell, a first-year teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach and subject of the 2006 movie The Freedom Writers, as a case study where an educator practiced the components of transformational leadership in the classroom to transform students’ lives. Gruwell used idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration to transform a classroom of gang members into a community of scholars and authors. Following the case examples, leadership educators are provided examples of how to incorporate the four components of transformational leadership in their instructional methods. The purpose is to not only demonstrate the theory in action, but to deepen students’ learning of leadership theory.

This study was conducted to explore leadership development within student collegiate clubs and organizations at an agrarian university in Ukraine. The data were then compared to a College of Agricultural Sciences at a university within the United States. The information collected in the study will serve as a basis for understanding leadership development within student collegiate clubs and organizations. The findings indicated that leadership development within student collegiate clubs and organizations is occurring. The study found that leadership development is a product of the culture in which it functions. Students from the Ukrainian university are developing leadership skills through a highly socialized model. This results in the development of a collaborative leadership style, which reflects the philosophy of the former Soviet culture. In sharp contrast to the collaborative style, the United States group is developing more of an individualistic style, indicative of its culture.

There has been an increased frequency of leadership courses being taught online. Scant research exists that describes effective practices for teaching leader ship online. This application brief describes an assignment, the “Real Life Leader in the Mirror” given to undergraduate students in an online personal leadership course as an end of course final project. In this assignment, students synthesize leadership concepts by comparing and contrasting their personalities, interests, beliefs, and capacities with a leader in the media. Through this assignment, students demonstrated the leadership competency of self-awareness and development. Specifically, students articulated knowledge of self, an understanding of self, the value of understanding self, ability to understand self, and the behavior of actually enhancing their understanding of self through this assignment.

To meet the demands for effective leadership, leadership educators should integrate high-impact practices for students to develop, practice, and evaluate their leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities. The purpose of this application brief is to describe how undergraduate leadership teaching assistant (ULTA) experiences can be a high- impact practice for undergraduates studying leadership. The ULTA experience at Texas A&M University in the Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications (ALEC) department was examined using the six characteristics purported by Kuh (2008) to describe effective high- impact practices: considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks, interaction with faculty and peers on substantive matters, increased likelihood of experiencing diversity, frequent feedback on performance, application of learning to different settings, and better understanding of self in relation to others. The ULTA experience can be a high-impact practice that provides leadership students with the opportunities to apply their leadership learning to their teaching roles and reflect on their experience to gain new leadership perspectives. Recommendations for implementing this practice include: purposeful interactions with ULTAs, feedback and assessment of experience, training, and a rigorous recruitment process.

This article highlights the Chancellor’s Leadership Class, a highly selective, four-year program for undergraduate students at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The four primary components of the program are coursework, community service, skill building, and mentoring. Although the program has a uniform structure for all students, it is tailored to meet the unique needs and goals of each student through a concept called prescriptive leadership development.